October 2015 archive

Welcome to episode #4 of For Immediate Release. This week’s panel includes Think AHA Chief Instigator Mitchell Levy (who is also the host of Thought Leader Life on the FIR Podcast Network), Stone Temple Consulting senior consultant Doug Haslam, and ClaimWizard co-founder and marketing director Lynette Young.

On today’s show, we explored the following topics:

• A Washington Post reporter called out Edelman for soliciting reporters’ insights on a client’s communications efforts, not an unusual practice, but this time it was veiled in secrecy and involved a donation made on the reporter’s behalf to a charitable organization. While a couple reporters found the solicitation unacceptable, it didn’t get any serious traction as a story. We wonder why.
• Twitter has launched Twitter Moments, the latest in a barrage of news platforms that also includes Facebook’s Instant Articles, Apple News, Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP), and Snapchat Live Stories. What are the implications for the practice of PR and, in particular, pitching stories to the media?
• Justine Sacco, the PR professional shamed by the Internet for a misguided tweet, is now working for FanDuel, one of the two big fantasy sports gambling sites that finds itself embroiled in its own controversy. Yet several sources including the New York Post have made an issue of Sacco’s role with the company.
• In his Tech Report, Dan York looks at Ello’s iOS app, whether email (and tools like Tiny Letter) aren’t the anti-Facebook, the plans to live-stream the Democratic debate, and Dan’s upcoming talk at AstriCon.
• A study from Maxwell PR + Engagement delves into blogger expectations and practices when it comes to working with brands.
• Mitchell leads a discussion on best practices for becoming a thought leader.
• PR News wants $450 for the print version of a social media guide. Would you pay?
• Cinemagraphs are taking off in social media, prompting stock photo houses to rush to build their libraries while a German startup, Gallereplay, will focus exclusively on them.

Links to the source material for this episode are on Delicious.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

Join us next week for our third episode. Joining me on the panel will be Shonali Burke, Kami Watson Huyse, and Dave Fleet.

About this week’s panel:

Doug Haslam’s  career has spanned a variety of disciplines within the communications field: radio technology, editorial production, public relations, marketing, social media and digital. Doug began with public radio, producing news and thoughtful sports programs, moving into technology public relations, and currently to social media and content strategy for brands of all sizes and industries. Doug’s love of media has come full circle, as his most recent positions have seen him taking full advantage of his content creation skills, managing social media and brand publishing programs for a wide variety of clients.

Mitchell Levy is focused on democratizing thought leadership. According to LinkedIn, he is the first Thought Leader Architect in the world!  As of June 25, 2013, there were over 115,000 people in LinkedIn with “Social Media” in their title, only 500  with “Thought Leader” and only one “Thought Leader Architect” . Marshall Goldsmith, The Most Influential Leadership Thinker in the World (Thinkers50 Survey—Sponsored by Harvard Business Review) calls Mitchell’s 18th and latest book #CREATING THOUGHT LEADERS “the career Bible for thought leaders!”  As a Thought Leader Architect, Mitchell helps companies turn their experts into recognized thought leaders.

Lynette Young is co-founder and Director of Marketing ClaimWizard. ClaimWizard is a software-as-a-service workflow management system for the public adjuster industry. She is a marketing technology strategist and published author with focus on digital marketing and implementation services. With over 25 years in technology, 17 of those years in digital marketing, she is well positioned as a “full stack marketer” giving her a distinct advantage in today’s fast paced business and environment. Over her professional career, Lynette has worked with clients of all sizes ranging from Google, Twitter, Harlequin Publishing, and American Airlines to HVAC installers, an email marketing service provider, local appliance retailers, other agencies, corporate franchises, and public adjusting firms. Lynette heads up the ClaimWizard digital marketing products and team.

The post FIR #4: Leave Justine alone! appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.

Welcome to episode #3 of For Immediate Release. This week’s panel includes Internet Society Senior Content Strategist Dan York (Dan is also the FIR Podcast Network’s tech correspondent), Scott Monty of Scott Monty Strategies, and 4L Strategies partner Jennifer Zingsheim Phillips. More details on the panel appear at the end of this post.

On today’s show, we explored the following topics:

• Volkswagen has brought four PR agencies on board to help deal with its self-made emissions cheating scandal. Does VW need PR or do they just need to start behaving ethically? And are PR practitioners out of line for writing posts and commentaries about the crisis?
• Peeple is an app due for release in November that will let people rate other people the way you can rate a restaurant on Yelp. The public response can be charitably described as outraged while the developers insist it’s nothing but positive.
• Business Wire released a report on the convergence if PR and investor relations. Is this consolidation or just a preferable business practice?
• It’s Breast Cancer Awareness Month and marketers everywhere are turning to pink to promote their brands’ solidarity. Most of it is just “pinkwashing,” though. How can brands be serious about their commitment to this (and, for that matter, any) cause?
• Google is about to take the wraps off an open-source project to compete with Facebook’s Instant Articles (not to mention similar offerings from Snapchat and Apple). What does this mean for the news ecosystem in which PR plays such an important part?
• Shot is a Kickstarter project that aims to make it easy for people with iPhones to create Virtual Reality (VR) photos and videos. In the meantime, newsrooms everywhere are gearing up to embrace VR.
• Millennials are willing to pay for content — just not news.
• ScottTrade is the latest institution to have to react to a data security breach. Shouldn’t any company that keeps customer data on servers be prepared to address an unwelcome intrusion?
• PR StackBook version 2 is out, with 30 PR professionals contributing 48 practical guides to more than 250 digital tools we can use in content marketing, PR, and SEO.
• Tumblr now lets you hide your Tumblr blog from the web. Some say this is creating yet another walled garden that is antithetical to the underlying philosophy of the Internet.
• Facebook has revamped Notes to make it more of a blogging tool to compete with Medium and LinkedIn.
• Beloved comic strip Bloom County is back after nearly 25 years. It’s on the Web only, and creator Berkeley Breathed is using it to attack the one-or-two-spaces-at-the-end-of-a-sentence controversy.

Links to the source material for this episode are on Delicious.

Special thanks to Jay Moonah for the opening and closing music.

Join us next week for our third episode. Joining me on the panel will be Mitchell Levy, Lynette Young, and Doug Haslam.

About this week’s panel:

Scott Monty is an internationally recognized leader in digital communications, digital transformation, social media and marketing. As principal of Scott Monty Strategies, he counsels brands and agencies on strategy, executive communications, influencer management, the customer experience, and digital initiatives.

Scott spent six years at Ford Motor Company, as a strategic advisor on crisis communications, influencer relations, digital customer customer service, innovative product launches and more. He is a board member of the American Marketing Association and an advisor for RPM Ventures, My Dealer Service, and Crowd Companies. He writes about the changing landscape of business, technology, communications, marketing and leadership at ScottMonty.com and is the executive editor and co-host of the Sherlock Holmes website and podcast I Hear of Sherlock Everywhere.

Jennifer Zingsheim Phillips has  worked in politics–many sides, including political party work, working for a state senator, and lobbying. She also has worked at Fleishman Hillard, one of the biggest PR firms in the  world, and she has also done a stint in retail, working in customer service at a well-known furniture and lifestyle store. Jen currently is a partner at 4L strategies, an online media analysis and monitoring firm.

Jen’s work has been published in business magazines. She also brings to the table web content creation experience, podcasting, and fiction writing.

Dan York, CISSP, is a passionate advocate for the open Internet focused on helping people understand the changes going on all around us within communication technology and practices. Dan currently serves the Internet Society as the Senior Content Strategist focused on the Deploy360 Programme – creating, curating and promoting online content that helps service providers, companies and individuals more quickly deploy Internet technologies such as IPv6 and DNSSEC. Separately, Dan is also the Chairman of the global Voice Over IP Security Alliance (VOIPSA). Dan is also active within the real-time communications area of the IETF.

Since the mid-1980’s Dan has been working with online communication technologies and helping businesses and organizations understand how to use and participate in those new media. An author of multiple books on networking, security, IPv6 and Linux, Dan is a dynamic and engaging speaker who frequently presents at industry conferences and events and has been blogging and writing online for over 12 years. His most recent books are “Migrating Applications to IPv6” and “The Seven Deadliest Unified Communications Attacks”.

The post FIR #3: People who don’t want Peeple appeared first on FIR Podcast Network.